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Re: creating backups

My personal choice: I backup only "/home". My disaster recovery plan is to do a clean install, and then restore "/home".

I do keep a record of changes that I make to system-wide configuration files. And I keep that record in a directory under "/home" so that it will be available to consult for a reinstall.

As to why? Restoring from a backup takes almost as long as a clean install. So I might as well save the effort of backup.

Backup for "/home": I am currently using "dar" for that. It is not part of a standard install, but it is in the repo. I backup to an external drive.

Multimedia and shared stuff: I have a separate partition that I mount at "/shared". I have bulky multimedia there rather than in "/home". And I share that with Windows systems (via samba) and other linux systems (via NFS).

I regularly backup "/shared" to another computer, using "rsync".

That's about what I do. You will probably choose a different solution. But I hope you find it helpful to know what some other folk are doing.

Backup of /home is done with rsync, The primary system partition is nvme0n1p2, which is updated frequently. A fully functional backup sits on sdb3. I update it quarterly. Both zypper dup and rsync work well.

Home partitions on USB-drives are mirrored to a distant box (300km). Functionality and integrity of backups is checked at regular intervals.

SSDs are now very affordable and prices are still dropping. A Crucial MX 500GB now starts at some 63€.

Re: creating backups

I do keep a record of changes that I make to system-wide configuration files.

Hi nrickert,

Would you mind to let us know what you think are the relevant system-wide configuration files worth to keep backups of (for a PC owner)?

My personal collection of system data that I backup along with the /home directory are the complete directories /etc and /var plus the /root directory where I maintain a couple of scripts. I sometimes, however, wonder whether this selection is the most reasonable.

And to add to the backup tips already given here: I store the output of 'rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME}\n'' along with 'zypper lr -pu' in text files to produce listings of installed packages and repositories within my /home directory prior to each backup. That, I think, might help me to amend a freshly installed default system if a new install ever becomes necessary.